Rupert Wildt
Rupert Wildt ( born June 25, 1905 in Munich, † January 9, 1976 in Orleans ( Massachusetts)) was German American astronomer. He explained the first time the energy transport in the sun.
Wildt (son of Hertha and Gero Wildt ) began in 1923 in Berlin with the study of physics, chemistry and astronomy, graduating in 1928 with a doctorate on the Diffusionslichthof in layers from Photo.
Rupert Wildt who specialized in the study of stellar atmospheres and planetary atmospheres. He wanted to justify the work area astrochemistry. 1931-1934 he identified on the basis of absorptions in the infrared spectrum of Jupiter and Saturn, the presence of gaseous ammonia and methane. For Uranus and Neptune, he proved methane. He developed models about the internal structure of the large gas planets. From 1928 to 1929 he was an assistant at the Observatory at Bonn Arnold Kohlschütter, from 1930 to 1933, then assistant at the observatory at Göttingen Hans Kienle.
While Prof. Kienle supported his further career active, he was ranked by influential Nazi sites in Göttingen as "politically unreliable". Therefore Wildt saw no future in Germany and received from January 1, 1935 with the support of astrophysicist Henry Norris Russell, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena. Thus, his emigration was achieved in the United States. In an obituary DeMarcus students in 1977 reported that the Nazis Wildts former Jewish friend sent in the USA in order to persuade him to return to Germany. He rejected the suggestion.
On January 1, 1935, he was supported by Henry Norris Russell as a Rockefeller Fellow at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena (USA), from 1936 at the observatory at Princeton.
There he declared in 1939 his most important discovery, the transport of energy in the photosphere of the sun and cold stars on the formation and decomposition of weakly stable negative H- ions, which are very common there. The existence of the negatively charged ions, which is formed by addition of a free electron to a neutral H, predicted in 1930 by Hans Bethe and 1950 shown by Herbert Massey in the laboratory. The necessary free electrons come from the metal atoms.
In 1938 he presented a model of the internal structure of the gas planets. He imagined they had a fixed Earth-like smaller core surrounded by layers of water ice condensed gases and outside highly compressed gases.
In 1940 he described the greenhouse effect by carbon dioxide on the planet Venus, which was last measured by the probe Venus Express. 1948 until his retirement in 1973, he worked as a professor of astronomy at Yale University. After the war he worked in 1947 in Basel and in Hamburg in 1951 as a visiting professor.
Between 1957 and 1965, a difficult one for him redress procedure with German authorities went. He was supported by Prof. Kienle and Prof. Otto Heckmann. At the end, he was retroactively from 1 October 1960, the salary of a professor emeritus.
In 1962 he married Katherine Eldredge, 1966, he received the Eddington Medal exclusively for his interpretation of the energy transport in the sun.
Most recently, Wildt dealt with the flash spectrum of the sun. He treated stellar atmospheres different from local thermodynamic equilibrium, a now recognized method.
His name borne by the asteroid (1953 ) Rupertwildt and the crater Wildt on the moon.
His written heritage located in the Yale library.